Fly Me to the Moon

On the way to the Maryland Sheepand Wool Festival , we visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. We were very impressed that the place was teeming with activities and school children from school trips.

You know how some people can recognise a celebrity from a mile away? Well, I'm not one of those people. I once ran into Stephanie Seymour in Place Vendome and didn't recognise her. Why were all the men suddenly tripping over their tongue? Then there was the incident involving Estelle Halliday on the Rue St Honoré, and nope I didn't recognise her either, although I did think at the time that she could use a bit of fattening up. So, when I saw this local celebrity being mobbed, I was wondering who is he?(admit it, when I said local celebrity, you were expecting Wendy.. but face it, Wendy is a global celebrity, not like Topper Shutt). It was hard getting a photo of him without making him look possessed.

asleep ...

or about so sneeze.

He was actually mobbed by school children as he was giving a talk in the Space Hangar. That's the Enterprise behind him. It's enormous.

Then there were the planes, lots and lots of them.. enough to make a grown man start acting like an excited boy.

The Concorde, joint venture between Britain and France and the world's first commercial supersonic jet. Not such a pity that they have stopped flying when I recall the windows rattling whenever they flew over.

The blackbird (SR-71), the world's fastest jet-propelled aircraft. It's considered by many to be the pinnacle of aviation technology development during the Cold War. This particular one accrued 2,800 hours of flight time during 24 years of active service in the US Air Force. On its last flight on March 6, 1990, Lt. Col Ed Yielding and Lt. Col Joseph Vida set a speed record flying from Los Angelos to D.V. in 1 hour 4 minutes and 20 secs, averaging 3,418 kilometers (2,124 miles) per hours. At the flight's conclusion, they landed in Dulles International Airport and turned the plane over to the Smithsonian.

The Enola Gay, to ever live in infamy dropping the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima. Let us never forget this, in hopes that it would never happen again.

Check out this tiny little plane, Lac Cucaracha. It was Henri Mignet's vision that amateurs could build it and teach themself to fly it. Designed in 1933, the Pou de Ciel (Flying Flea) enjoyed a period of fame before a series of accidents made it's popularity plummetted. This is the first HM.14 built and flown in the US.

and another one, that you can build yourself, the Rutan Varieze. Burt Rutan began selling the Varieze plans in 1976 and compared to other home build designs, it was easier and performed better, costing much less than planes produced by Cessna, Beechcraft or Piper. Over 3,000 sets of plan were sold by 1980. Propelled by a 100 horsepower engine, the plane could carry 2 adults about 700 miles (1,130) at approx 290 km/hour (180 mph). Not only economical to fly and quick to build, it was designed for a builder of average skills. (Nothing personal, but I would much rather have a builder of superior skills do the building.)

Even at the space and air museum, I found the time to do a few stitches.

Of course, while we were in the neighbourhoood, there was knitting and a visit to Knit happens to see Kristine but she wasn't there. It would be churlish to not visit, when we were practically on her doorstep. Holly was there though and as always, super-helpful.

She pointed out a basket of a recent arrival into the shop and look.. some of it came home with me. Yes, it's true, great things come in small packages

and there, you'd thought that I wouldn't be able to write about super-models, weathermen, supersonic jets and knitting in the same post.

I have to being a bit mortified by my recent yarn acquisitions. I'm feeling a strong need to cheat about my April/May yarn in/out total. It's not like Weight Watchers where you can skip the undies to drop a few grams ;-)

Posted by atu at May 25, 2006 11:59 PM | TrackBack